Enterprises and their customers interact with each other for a variety of purposes. For example, enterprises may engage with existing customers and potential customers to draw the customer's attention towards a product or a service, to provide information about an event of customer interest, to offer incentives and discounts, to solicit feedback, to provide billing related information, and the like. Similarly, the customers may initiate interactions with the enterprises to enquire about products/services of interest, to resolve concerns, to make payments, to lodge complaints, and the like.
Typically, a customer may wish to interact with a customer support representative of an enterprise using a natural language form of communication. Communicating in such a manner enables the customer to express her/his intent easily via voice, chat, email, etc. and to obtain the desired outcomes.
To support the customer's desire for natural language form of communication, many enterprises provide automated systems, such as for example automatic voice recognition (AVR)/interactive voice response (IVR) based interaction systems, chat assistants and the like, to capture customer requests, process them, and then perform required action to meet the customer's objectives.
These automated systems are typically scripted or menu based. From the perspective of the customer, these automated systems can be frustrating because they are constructed using too many menus, too many menu options, missing options, and so on and so forth. From the enterprise's point of view, processing of natural language interactions can be difficult because of speaker accent, word choice, spelling errors, slang, abbreviations, customers asking questions unrelated to the enterprise, and the like.
When a customer becomes frustrated, she or he can exit the interaction, perhaps never to return From the point of view of the enterprise, frustrating and unsuccessful customer interactions result in no sales and are therefore bad for business.